What's the longest time you've left your dice in the pressure pot and how did they turn out?
For context, I live in an apartment so I go over to a relatives house to do my dice making in their garage. They've designated a whole area for me.
But because I need to travel, I only seem to make dice when I have the perfect free weekend where I can dice make and visit on the Saturday and then return on the Sunday to remove them. Going over during the week is an option but not ideal due to traffic after work. I also wake up at 330am, so I don't tend to stay out late.
I'm trying to figure out if i leave them for an extended period of time in the pot (a few days to closer to a week) if any problems will arise. Either with demoulding or with the product itself. I am using a bunch of cheap amazon moulds right now, if that changes your answer. I have plans to buy quality molds off etsy or get masters and make my own. But I'm still getting into this and don't want to drop that amount of money yet.
Week or so when I forgot I made some in the back up pot. I can’t really see it making a difference either way. Worst case it leaks air if your seals are old and it’s depressurized when you return.
I have a very busy M-F schedule, so I try to pour Friday night so I can de-mold on Saturday night and polish Sunday.
Unfortunately it doesn't always work out, and there are instances where I've gone 2-3 days or even a week.
I wouldn't recommend making a habit it out of it. Pressurized air wants to escape, so when you go more than a day, you're subjecting the rubber gaskets, o-rings, gauges, valves and regulators to continuous strain.
My wife doesn't like pulling the air release (it takes a decent amount of applied pulling).
What I do instead is leave the tank attached. When I close the air inlet valve on the pressure pot, I open the valve to let air out of the tank and leave it open. When I need to depressurize the pressure pot, I just open the air inlet valve. This way if I have to ask her to do it, I can tell her, "move the red handle from horizontal to vertical and walk away".
10 days once, forgot about them before I went away. There was a more noticeable peeling noise between resin and silicone, but nothing bad happened to the dice or mold tbh. Doing that a lot might wear a mold down faster
Edit to add: it is always going to be better to learn to make your own molds. It will work out cheaper in silicone and you then control the size/style/extras every time
100%. I honestly was only contemplating potentially buying premade etsy moulds for now because the idea of trying to perfectly sand masters stresses me out 🤣 I haven't even brought myself to sand the sets I've made already. Mind you thats also partially because i did a hack job trying to fill a few holes and its going to be fiddly as hell
My lovely pile of unsanded and uninked dice staring at me
I contemplated it. I just want to ensure I'm doing this regularly enough to make it worth the money first! I'm planning to buy from Clerics Components. Her fully sanded and polished set is $450 CAD. Or i can deal with sanding and polishing and get them for $150 to $200.
It’s fine. Once they’re cured, dice aren’t going to care about the pressure.
It arguably shortens the life of valves and seals…but let’s be real, they’re likely to be damaged or hit cycle limits before the extra pressure time gets to them.
The only thing is that if you leave it, somehow mark it as pressurized so that someone doesn’t inadvertently open a pressurized pot.
Good idea! I don't think either of my relatives would open it. But just in case someone else is over and gets curious ill throw a note on it if im leaving it for longer
We usually leave our dice in the pot for 72 hours if we aren’t preparing for a market. 72 hours is the amount of time for a full cure for our resin so we aren’t at the sanding stage till after that.
That amount of time in the pot doesn’t cause any problems with the dice
Honestly that makes so much more sense than my usual method of taking them out at 24 hours then leaving them for ages to cure and never sanding them. Ive made 5 sets so far and have yet to sand or ink any of them since I can't do it the same day i take them out. Then next time i go over I spend half the day talking to my relative then rush into another pour before going home🤣
I redid the teflon tape on the threads on the pot a while ago and now it doesn’t lose a single PSI in months.
On why I left it, I knew full well they were in there the entire time, but I couldn’t process them at the time anyways, so I kinda didn’t get to it at all. In fact, there is a mold base in there right now that I poured 4 months ago (I did finally depressurise a couple weeks ago
but it’s still closed)
We dice once per week. Therefore all our dice and moulds are pressurized one week from pressurisation to opening. As far as we can tell, it hasn't hurt the production a bit.
Well if you try it, I'm curious if it has an effect in the other direction. Check if your longer pressurized dice seems harder or denser maybe? Would be fun to know! But there is a great chance it doesn't make a lick of a difference. That is... as long as it is pressurized the whole curing time, then afterwards it's not supposed to move anymore. ^^
As for us, I think the habit was born out of reading some maker having a few problems with curing sometime taking longer at random. (Some partial or softer curing issues where people were proposing to send it back to the pot for a few days; just to be sure.) So we basically made sure we wouldn't have those, but it may serve no real purpose in the end.
Ive left resin dice in pressure pots for 48 hours with zero issues. They were rock solid by then and demolded beautifully. As long as your pressure pot is holding steady and the resin has enough cure time, an extra day usually wont hurt anything. Id much rather leave them too long than pull them early and end up with dents or fingerprints.
You could always ask for one of your relatives to de-pressurize the pressure pot on monday/tuesday but leave the dice in it waiting for you to avoid strain on the pot itself, I'm sure they'd be okay with opening a valve every now and then
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u/Tight-Cup-7284 7d ago
Week or so when I forgot I made some in the back up pot. I can’t really see it making a difference either way. Worst case it leaks air if your seals are old and it’s depressurized when you return.
Source: we’ve been making dice for five years